Category: How To

Gone are the days where professionals, and brands alike, segment their marketing efforts due to the fear of missing out on message delivery. The use of social media and other online mediums has become common place. Yet most still have issues in creating a balanced campaign that uses the individual strengths of an outlet.

While a brand or marketing team may have designed a quality, targeted ad message, most fail to adapt and change the ad to meet the specific user needs of a particular social media outlet.

Twitter is meant to engage and hold a conversation, while Facebook is ideal for delivering detailed content messages. LinkedIn is more ideal for making those professional introductions for a brand that will lead to word of mouth referral business and investor growth opportunities. Instagram is perfect long term strategies and building brand strength around core messages and beliefs.

The list goes on and on, but these are just a part of a professional’s or brands’ marketing components. For example, during a trade show or live conference, think about having an iPad that is being mirrored (via an Apple TV) to a large screen at the booth. And as you interact with your audience, ask them to relay their thoughts or reviews of your brand or product via Twitter, then and there. Tell them that by doing so, they are not only engaging their followers, but because they are mentioning you, they are able to capitalize on your brands following and potentially grow their own. Its a simple way of holding a potential clients attention, while getting them to actually think about your brand or product and not just listening to a sales pitch in order to get a give away or contest entry.

It’s hard to believe that less than a decade ago, the average professional did not need to know anything about marketing or branding. Even those Millenials that used YouTube as a way to create an online following didn’t need to understand the intricacies of building a brand. Now, virtually every serious company around the globe checks a potential employee’s online profile as part of their hiring process.

Whether you work for a Fortune 1000 company or are self employed, today’s professional should have a formal set of brand guidelines. The reason for this is simply to ensure that a brand is being represented the same way every time a representation is made. It may come in the form of an online post of the printing of a marketing flyer. When working for someone else, you are tasked with the responsibility of not just following your own guidelines, but those of your employer.
Developing a set of brand guidelines is quite simple and should include these aspects.

Brand / company color scheme

Official Logo (yes individuals can have a logo of their personal name)

These 10 aspects are the most common brand guidelines. Now, if your a micro-manager or neurotically detailed you may get a lot more specific. Just remember that consistency is key and the core reasoning behind Brand Guidelines.

When I was a few years younger than I am today, the days seemed to have more than enough hours to them. I could work 12 hours a day…. come home and cook a gourmet meal…. read a few chapters of the latest NYTimes Best Seller and spend quality time with my husband. Then came the longest running tech boom in recorded history. Gone were the 10 years of advancements followed by 10 years of stagnant growth. The achievements in technology has allowed Entreprenuers and other professionals to take control over their job functions like never before. The down side is that more is expected of employees from companies.

Balancing our private, family and professional lives has never been more crucial. Fortunately for most of us, technology has given us assistants like Siri, Alexa and a host of platforms to automate certain aspects of our lives. While services like Hoote Suite have been helping us schedule social media posts for quite some time now, apps like IFTTT have not gotten the exposure I feel they deserve.

For those that are willing to spend a little time setting up appropriate recipes, yes recipes as in mixing technology components together to achieve a desired end result, IFTTT can take the burden of many tasks off your shoulders.

The beauty of using IF is that everything you do is done blindly, unlike social scheduling platforms like Hoote Suite where they tell the world you used them to post content. Most of my followers think I spend the bulk of my time curating content for our various social / online outlets. In reality I spend about 25% of my time adding content. The rest is done via the carefully created recipes and the underlying powerhouse that is If This Then That (IFTTT).

Should I be telling my secret? Probably not. But the goal of our current mission is to help professionals lead a truly balanced life.